In
2002 Jamshed Bharucha, PhD, began a new phase of his career as provost
and senior vice president of Tufts University. Before coming to Tufts
he was a teacher, researcher, and administrative official at Dartmouth
College. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College, where he majored
in biopsychology, received an MA in philosophy from Yale University, and
a PhD in cognitive psychology from Harvard University. Bharucha is interested
in the brain, the relationship between the brain and the mind, and how
the brain enables mental phenomena.

An accomplished
musician, Bharucha began studying the cognitive aspects of music in the
early 1980s, and started using music to study the brain around 1990. It
was at this time that he began collaborating with neurologist Mark Tramo,
studying patients who had had selective brain damage from strokes or from
neurosurgical procedures. "We would try to see what musical deficits
they had," said Bharucha. "That's really when magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) came into extensive use, and I jumped into that." Cognitive
psychologists became interested in a variant of MRI, called functional
MRI, which looks at brain activity rather than brain structure.

General
principles of cognition suggest that the plasticity of the brain enables
it to learn. "The brain figures out what is regular about this environment,
encodes those regularities, and then uses those patterns as filters to
perceive the world going forward. That's how perception becomes facilitated
so that predictable things are processed quickly, freeing up conscious
resources for unexpected or unfamiliar things."

One of Bharucha's
interests is using computational neural net models of learning combined
with functional MRI to try to show retrospectively that there might have
been plasticity. "We have an ongoing cross-cultural study in which
people who have grown up in different cultures  we used Indian and
American people  listen to the same piece of music or the same samples
of speech. Depending on whether the music or the speech is culturally
familiar or not, we look to see if there are different patterns of activation
in the brain."

"In
the case of language, just looking at the temporal lobe, which is where
the auditory cortex is, we found a much greater extent of activation when
listening to a familiar language than when listening to an unfamiliar
language, and that implies plasticity  that the connections between
neurons get stronger or weaker or new connections may form or some might
fall off in the course of learning."

With music,
Bharucha hasn't found any systematic differences in either the auditory
cortex or the frontal lobe. "Maybe the difference is more distributed
throughout the brain and much more subtle, rather than focused on a particular
area," he mused. Using a pattern recognition analysis, Bharucha looked
at the extent of activation in 16 brain regions for each of the subjects.
"You can create a vector or an array out of those 16 numbers and
correlate this 16-element vector of each subject with each other subject,
and you get an inter-subject correlation matrix that shows how close any
pair of subjects are in their brain activity. You put this through an
algorithm called multi-dimensional scaling, which takes a multi-dimensional
space, in this case 16 dimensions, and tries to reduce it to a minimum
number of dimensions. In this case we were able to see that in two dimensions,
the subjects separate themselves out very nicely, the Indian and American
subjects." The data suggest that cultural space maps into the brain
in some way.

Bharucha
is still settling in to his new laboratory at Tufts. He wants to focus
on the projects that are already up and going and make sure that his graduate
student is successful and fully launched. While the only collaborator
he is actively seeking right now is someone to do the technical side of
functional MRI, he is looking forward to future collaborations with people
in the Boston area.